[Julie Steiner]

Thank you for these, Matt, and I apologize for not saying so sooner. Very helpful to have your observations on those traveling dactyls.

This is by Geoffrey Hill, from many Sapphics to choose from in this part of his sequence "The Daybooks" (Odi Barbare, 2012). I find it hilarious (Hillarious?) that in S2L1 he mentions Google, since I had already resorted to it twice by then in this section.

XXXI

Ghelderode's price here or the cost of Ensor.
Bloated Eros, your pain-extended body,
Jerked abroad scar-angry, a coarse cadaver
          Wired to a fine art.

Google my old blind of Platonics with Mc-
Taggart's mystic corpulence deemed endearing.
Sentiment grown wholly at one with logic,
          Durance feints passes.

Nobbled rhetor cleared but as aberration,
Scarcely gauge what skin I would have you shed here.
Rhetor not slave killer with net and trident
          Though it could well be.

So Petrarca, prego Madonna prego;
Wear dark glasses we must protect the sun. This
When in some sense naked desire's upon us
          Let us defer to.

Beggars' clay bowls ample for what was given,
I remember also Tagore's ecstatic
Mornings, all that rhapsody tuned by rapt strings,
          Shantineketan.

Given your pledge I would commute to service
Vessels once fit only for salvage bear my,
Our, libations fructile towards the altar
          Stone of this strophe.